Trump’s Permitting Boss Aims to Deliver on AI Data Center Plans

The White House’s new permitting director wants to vastly expand her office’s work in getting projects built—including, for the first time, data centers and artificial intelligence facilities.

That would be a boon to President Donald Trump, whose economic policy advocates for the construction of projects like OpenAI Inc.‘s $500 billion Stargate AI venture, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co.‘s $100 billion investment in new chip factories, and as many new hardrock mines as possible.

Many of those projects will have to secure federal permits under the National Environmental Policy Act before they can break ground, a daunting prospect that can take years.

Enter the Federal Permitting Improvement Steering Council, which shepherds complex projects through the process by harmonizing different agencies’ environmental reviews, anticipating hurdles before they create delays, and holding agencies accountable to deadlines. On average, the 25-person council says it’s able to shave 18 months off a project’s review time.

Although the council is authorized to help projects in 19 different industrial sectors, six of them—semiconductors, AI and machine learning, high-performance computing, quantum information science, data storage and management, and cybersecurity—were only added in 2022 and mostly haven’t been tried.

“I want to put more projects on the dashboard,” Emily Domenech, who was named the Permitting Council’s executive director May 28, said in an interview. “One of my personal hopes is that, over the next four years, we’re able to touch every kind of project that is authorized in our statute.”

Interior Secretary Doug Burgum has already contacted the Permitting Council to discuss a recent executive order calling for building data centers on federal lands, Domenech said.

Those projects “seem like really ideal candidates to go through the FAST 41 process,” she said, referring to the Fixing America’s Surface Transportation Act, which authorized the council in 2015.

In another recent meeting, Domenech said officials at the Commerce Department talked about potential US investments in “everything ranging from traditional heavy manufacturing to things like pharmaceutical manufacturing. Those kinds of projects are technically eligible, and we haven’t done them before.”

Alex Herrgott, who led the Permitting Council during the first Trump administration, said the office’s pipeline of projects is likely to triple by the end of the year.

“Emily’s job will quickly migrate beyond just driving individual project accountability and transparency into a policy mandate to support President Trump on transforming and modernizing entire processes across 13 agencies,” Herrgott said.

Domenech is a former senior policy adviser to House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) and his predecessor, former Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.). She led House negotiations on reforming NEPA, which culminated in a series of changes in the 2023 Fiscal Responsibility Act that conservatives had long pushed for.

Getting to ‘Yes’

But Domenech doesn’t just want to help proposed projects get permitting decisions faster; she also wants to make sure those decisions are “yes.”

“My hope is that there is a change in mentality about how we approach the permitting process in the federal government, because our default position should be, ‘How do we say yes to this?’” she said. “‘How do we get this through the process quickly, how do we ensure that the appropriate environmental mitigation takes place where necessary, and how do we get to yes?’ That should be the goal.”

The Permitting Council’s authorizing statute says the office is meant to improve the timeliness, predictability, and transparency of the permitting process, and “does not predetermine the outcome of any federal decision-making process,” according to a statement on its website.

But to Domenech, the Permitting Council can play a similar role to the Department of Government Efficiency.

“I love the idea of thinking of it as a government efficiency exercise,” she said. “The federal government has been the hurdle for building in America for as long as I can remember. We should be the enabler for helping people build in America, not the obstacle they have to overcome.”

The Permitting Council is primed to play a bigger role than it ever has in the past, not just because of Trump’s aggressive economic agenda, but also because the White House recently scrubbed a 50-year old regulation that laid out standardized permitting procedures for all agencies to follow.

The elimination of those regulations—which stemmed from a district court ruling that found the Council on Environmental Quality had no rulemaking authority—means agencies will have to rely on their own, internal permitting standards under NEPA, which can vary across the government.

That makes it more crucial than ever for someone to keep the agencies on the same page, said Eric Beightel, Domenech’s immediate predecessor as the council’s head.

“It’s telling, to me, that they appointed an executive director for the Permitting Council before naming a chair for CEQ,” Beightel said.

At the same time, CEQ retains its statutory role of administering NEPA, and the council should “stay out of the NEPA implementation fray,” he said.

Climate Change, Environmental Justice

The death of the CEQ rule also means agencies need no longer consider the effects a proposed project will have on climate change and environmental justice communities, which are areas that have suffered more than their fair share of pollution.

Domenech hailed those developments.

“Nowhere in the statute does it say to specifically consider those two categories,” she said.

“Congress had an opportunity to direct agencies to consider those things and did not. And I think what we’ll see from the Trump administration is a return to the statute, rather than adding lots of extra requirements that are not in the law.”

Climate change and environmental justice will still be considered “where it’s appropriate,” she said. “But they can’t be added to every single project as an extra layer you have to clear in order to build America. That’s how we lose to China.”